Lisey’s Story (6 page)

“It's mighty hot, even fo' Nashville in August, wouldn't you say so, Toneh?”

Tony Eddington nodded obligingly but said nothing. His only comment so far had been to identify the tirelessly dancing photographer as Stefan Queensland of the Nashville
American
—also of U-Tenn Nashville, class of '85. “Hope y'all will help him out if y'can,” Tony Eddington had said to Scott as they began their walk over here.

“Yew'll finish yoah remarks,” Dashmiel said, “and there'll be anothuh round of applause.
Then,
Mistuh Landon—”

“Scott.”

Dashmiel had flashed a rictus grin, there for just a moment. “Then,
Scott,
yew'll go on and toin that all impawtant foist shovelful of oith.”
Toin? Foist? Oith?
Lisey mused, and it came to her that Dashmiel was very likely saying
turn that all-important first shovelful of earth
in his only semi-believable Louisiana drawl.

“All that sounds fine to me,” Scott replied, and that was all he had time for, because they had arrived.

Perhaps it's a holdover from the broken toothglass—that
omenish
feeling—but the plot of trucked-in dirt looks like a grave to Lisey: XL size, as if for a giant. The two crowds collapse into one around it and create that breathless suck-oven feel at the center. A campus security guard now stands at each corner of the ornamental velvet-rope barrier, beneath which Dashmiel, Scott, and “Toneh” Eddington have ducked. Queensland, the photographer, dances relentlessly with his big Nikon held up in front of his face.
Paging Weegee,
Lisey thinks, and realizes she envies him. He is so free, flitting gnatlike in the heat; he is twenty-five and all his shit still works. Dashmiel, however, is looking at him with growing impatience which Queensland affects not to see until he has
exactly the shot he wants. Lisey has an idea it's the one of Scott alone, his foot on the silly silver spade, his hair blowing back in the breeze. In any case, Weegee Junior at last lowers his big camera and steps back to the edge of the crowd. And it's while following Queensland's progress with her somewhat wistful regard that Lisey first sees the madman. He has the look, one local reporter will later write, “of John Lennon in the last days of his romance with heroin—hollow, watchful eyes at odd and disquieting contrast to his otherwise childishly wistful face.”

At the moment, Lisey notes little more than the guy's tumbled blond hair. She has little interest in people-watching today. She just wants this to be over so she can find a bathroom in the English Department over there across the parking lot and pull her rebellious underwear out of the crack of her ass. She has to make water, too, but right now that's pretty much secondary.

“Ladies and gentlemen!” Dashmiel says in a carrying voice. “It is mah distinct pleasure to introduce Mr. Scott Landon, author of the Pulitzer Prize–winnin
Relics
and the National Book Award–winnin
The Coster's Daughter.
He's come all the way from Maine with his lovely wife Lisa to inaugurate construction—that's right, it's finally happ'nin—on our very own Shipman LAH-bree. Scott Landon, folks, let's hear y'all give him a good Nashveel welcome!”

The crowd applauds at once,
con brio.
The lovely wife joins in, patting her palms together, looking at Dashmiel and thinking,
He won the NBA for
The Coaster's Daughter.
That's
Coaster,
not
Coster.
And I think you know it. I think you smucked it up on purpose. Why don't you like him, you petty man?

Then she happens to glance beyond him and this time she really
does
notice Gerd Allen Cole, just standing there with all that fabulous blond hair tumbled down to his eyebrows and the sleeves of a white shirt far too big for him rolled up to his substandard biceps. The tail of his shirt is out and dangles almost to the whitened knees of his jeans. On his feet are engineer boots with side-buckles. To Lisey they look dreadfully hot. Instead of applauding, Blondie has clasped his hands rather prissily and there's a spooky-sweet smile on his lips, which are moving slightly, as if in silent prayer. His eyes are fixed on Scott and they never waver. Lisey pegs Blondie at once. There are guys—they are almost
always guys—she thinks of as Scott's Deep Space Cowboys. Deep Space Cowboys have a lot to say. They want to grab Scott by the arm and tell him they understand the secret messages in his books; they understand that the books are really guides to God, Satan, or possibly the Gnostic Gospels. Deep Space Cowboys might be on about Scientology or numerology or (in one case) The Cosmic Lies of Brigham Young. Sometimes they want to talk about other worlds. Two years ago a Deep Space Cowboy hitchhiked all the way from Texas to Maine in order to talk to Scott about what he called
leavings.
These were most commonly found, he said, on uninhabited islands in the southern hemisphere. He knew they were what Scott had been writing about in
Relics.
He showed Scott the underlined words that proved it. The guy made Lisey very nervous—there was a certain wall-eyed look of
absence
about him—but Scott talked to him, gave him a beer, discussed the Easter Island monoliths with him for a bit, took a couple of his pamphlets, signed the kid a fresh copy of
Relics,
and sent him on his way, happy. Happy? Dancing on the smucking atmosphere. When Scott's got it strapped on tight, he's amazing. No other word will do.

The thought of actual violence—that Blondie means to pull a Mark David Chapman on her husband—does not occur to Lisey.
My mind doesn't run that way,
she might have said.
I just didn't like the way his lips were moving.

Scott acknowledges the applause—and a few raucous rebel yells—with the Scott Landon grin that has appeared on millions of book-jackets, all the time resting one foot on the shoulder of the silly shovel while the blade sinks slowly into the imported earth. He lets the applause run for ten or fifteen seconds, guided by his intuition (and his intuition is rarely wrong), then waves it off. And it goes. At once.
Foom.
Pretty cool, in a slightly scary way.

When he speaks, his voice seems nowhere near as loud as Dashmiel's, but Lisey knows that even with no mike or battery-powered bullhorn (the lack of either here this afternoon is probably someone's oversight), it will carry all the way to the back of the crowd. And the crowd is straining to hear every word. A Famous Man has come among them. A Thinker and a Writer. He will now scatter pearls of wisdom.

Pearls before swine,
Lisey thinks.
Sweaty swine, at that.
But didn't her father tell her once that pigs don't sweat?

Across from her, Blondie carefully pushes his tumbled hair back from his fine white brow. His hands are as white as his forehead and Lisey thinks,
There's one piggy who keeps to the house a lot. A stay-at-home swine, and why not? He's got all sorts of strange ideas to catch up on.

She shifts from one foot to the other, and the silk of her underwear all but
squeaks
in the crack of her ass. Oh, maddening! She forgets Blondie again in trying to calculate if she might not . . . while Scott's making his remarks . . . very surreptitiously, mind you . . .

Good Ma speaks up. Dour. Three words. Brooking no argument.
No, Lisey. Wait.

“Ain't gonna sermonize, me,” Scott says, and she recognizes the patois of Gully Foyle, the main character of Alfred Bester's
The Stars My Destination.
His favorite novel. “Too hot for sermons.”

“Beam us up, Scotty!”
someone in the fifth or sixth row on the parking-lot side of the crowd yells exuberantly. The crowd laughs and cheers.

“Can't do it, brother,” Scott says. “Transporters are broken and we're all out of lithium crystals.”

The crowd, being new to the riposte as well as the sally (Lisey has heard both at least fifty times), roars its approval and applauds. Across the way Blondie smiles thinly, sweatlessly, and grips his delicate left wrist with his long-fingered right hand. Scott takes his foot off the spade, not as if he's grown impatient with it but as if he has—for the moment, at least—found another use for it. And it seems he has. She watches, not without fascination, for this is Scott at his best, just winging it.

“It's nineteen-eighty-eight and the world has grown dark,” he says. He slips the ceremonial spade's short wooden handle easily through his loosely curled fist. The scoop winks sun in Lisey's eyes once, then is mostly hidden by the sleeve of Scott's lightweight jacket. With the scoop and blade hidden, he uses the slim wooden handle as a pointer, ticking off trouble and tragedy in the air in front of him.

“In March, Oliver North and Vice Admiral John Poindexter are indicted on conspiracy charges—it's the wonderful world of Iran-Contra, where guns rule politics and money rules the world.

“On Gibraltar, members of Britain's Special Air Service kill three unarmed IRA members. Maybe they should change the SAS motto from ‘Who dares, wins' to ‘Shoot first, ask questions later.'”

There's a ripple of laughter from the crowd. Roger Dashmiel looks hot and put out with this unexpected current-events lesson, but Tony Eddington is finally taking notes.

“Or make it ours. In July we goof and shoot down an Iranian airliner with two hundred and ninety civilians on board. Sixty-six of them are children.

“The AIDS epidemic kills thousands, sickens . . . well, we don't know, do we? Hundreds of thousands? Millions?

“The world grows dark. Mr. Yeats's blood-tide is at the flood. It rises. It rises.”

He looks down at nil but graying earth, and Lisey is suddenly terrified that he's seeing it, the thing with the endless patchy piebald side, that he is going to go off, perhaps even come to the break she knows he is afraid of (in truth she's as afraid of it as he is). Before her heart can do more than begin to speed up, he raises his head, grins like a kid at a county fair, and shoots the handle of the spade through his fist to the halfway point. It's a showy poolshark move, and the folks at the front of the crowd go
oooh.
But Scott's not done. Holding the spade out before him, he rotates the handle nimbly between his fingers, accelerating it into an unlikely spin. It's as dazzling as a baton-twirler's maneuver—because of the silver scoop swinging in the sun—and sweetly unexpected. She's been married to him since 1979 and had no
idea
he had such a sublimely cool move in his repertoire. (How many years does it take, she'll wonder two nights later, lying in bed alone in her substandard motel room and listening to dogs bark beneath a hot orange moon, before the simple stupid weight of accumulating days finally sucks all the wow out of a marriage? How lucky do you have to be for your love to outrace your time?) The silver bowl of the rapidly swinging spade sends a
Wake up! Wake up!
sunflash across the heat-dazed, sweat-sticky surface of the crowd. Lisey's husband is suddenly Scott the Pitchman, and she has never been so relieved to see that totally untrustworthy
honey, I'm hip
huckster's grin on his face. He has bummed them out; now he will try to sell them a throatful
of dubious get-well medicine, the stuff with which he hopes to send them home. And she thinks they will buy, hot August afternoon or not. When he's like this, Scott could sell Frigidaires to Inuits, as the saying is . . . and God bless the language pool where we all go down to drink, as Scott himself would no doubt add (and has).

“But if every book is a little light in that darkness—and so I believe, so I must believe, corny or not, for I write the damned things, don't I?—then every library is a grand old ever-burning bonfire around which ten thousand people come to stand and warm themselves every day and night. Fahrenheit four-fifty-one ain't in it. Try Fahrenheit four
thousand,
folks, because we're not talking kitchen ovens here, we're talking big old blast-furnaces of the brain, red-hot smelters of the intellect. We celebrate the laying of such a grand fire this afternoon, and I'm honored to be a part of it. Here is where we spit in the eye of forgetfulness and kick ignorance in his wrinkled old
cojones. Hey photographer!
”

Stefan Queensland snaps to, smiling.

Scott, also smiling, says: “Get one of this. The top brass may not want to use it, but you'll like it in your portfolio, I'll bet.”

Scott holds the ornamental tool out as if he intends to twirl it again. The crowd gives a hopeful little gasp, but this time he's only teasing. He slides his left hand down to the spade's collar, digs in, and drives the spade-blade deep, dousing its hot glitter in earth. He tosses its load of dirt aside and cries:
“I declare the Shipman Library construction site OPEN FOR BUSINESS!”

The applause that greets this makes the previous bursts sound like the sort of polite patter you might hear at a prep-school tennis match. Lisey doesn't know if young Mr. Queensland caught the ceremonial first scoop, but when Scott pumps the silly little silver spade at the sky like an Olympic hero, Queensland documents that one for sure, laughing behind his camera as he snaps it. Scott holds the pose for a moment (Lisey happens to glance at Dashmiel and catches that gentleman in the act of rolling his eyes at Mr. Eddington—Toneh). Then he lowers the spade to port arms and holds it that way, grinning. Sweat has popped on his cheeks and forehead in fine beads. The applause begins to taper off. The crowd thinks he's done. Lisey thinks he's only hit second gear.

When he knows they can hear him again, Scott digs in for an encore scoop. “This one's for Wild Bill Yeats!” he calls. “The bull-goose loony! And this one's for Poe, also known as Baltimore Eddie! This one's for Alfie Bester, and if you haven't read him, you ought to be ashamed!” He's sounding out of breath, and Lisey is starting to feel a bit alarmed. It's so
hot.
She's trying to remember what he had for lunch—was it something heavy or light?